Tuesday, 9 October 2012

AFTER
CENTURIES OF OPPRESSION, women have won the day at last and “pulled
decisively ahead [of men] by almost every measure.” This is the key
argument made by Hanna Rosin in a new book, The End of Men and the Rise of Women.
Mainly, it turns out, she means that there are more women enrolling in
and graduating from college now than there are men, and that their ranks
in the business world, in the professions, and in politics are
swelling: natural enough developments in an increasingly egalitarian
society that has seen its male-dominated manufacturing sector decimated
in recent decades. The big question for this reader is why — at the very
moment when we almost have people respecting one another as equals — we
would be talking about “The End” of anybody. I don’t want anybody to
end; I don’t buy for an instant that Men are Ending, and I can’t bring
myself to believe that much of anyone else will, either.

Rosin
makes her case in a series of chapters loosely organized around the
idea that economic power has irrevocably altered the various roles of
women in U.S. culture. In “Hearts of Steel: Single Girls Master the
Hook-Up,” she praises the freedom that young women have gained as a
benefit of what she calls the “hook-up culture” of modern university
life, making a contrast with her own college days in the late 1980s. Her
claim is that this new sexual freedom makes it possible for women to
pursue their careers more effectively, with less distraction. “The most
patient and thorough research about the hook-up culture shows that over
the long run, women benefit greatly from living in a world where they
can have sexual adventure without commitment or all that much shame, and
where they can enter into temporary relationships that don’t derail
their careers.”

This description has fit U.S. sexual mores for women for over 50
years. From the moment contraception became widely available to American
women, they have been able to enjoy sexual freedom “without commitment
or all that much shame” and to avoid marriage if they choose. The
salient point, then and now, is not so much “without commitment” as
“without fear of conception.” Women still face the same basic questions:
career vs. family; commitment vs. fancy-freedom; finding a mate who
will support our ambitions, and whose ambitions we, in turn, can
support. Many of us who came of age during the time of great sexual
permissiveness before the advent of AIDS find the current generation
much like our own, or if anything a little bit more careful: a mixed
bag, with some very “adventurous” people and some far less so. There’s
nothing new, in other words, about “hook-up culture.”

Serious omissions have been made in presenting some of the research in The End of Men. For example, Rosin cites an article in the New York Times (‘For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage‘)
as evidence that women don’t need men as much as they used to. They’re
having babies “outside marriage.” But the article in question says that
“[a]lmost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among
couples living together.” This would suggest that it’s the institution
of marriage, not the presence of men, that has declined.

Rosin
goes on to quote UVA sociologist Brad Wilcox: “The family changes over
the past four decades have been bad for men and bad for kids, but it’s
not clear they are bad for women.” So, is it fair to say that Wilxox
thinks “the erosion of marriage” is a positive thing for women?

Not so fast. Just a few weeks ago, an essay appeared in Slate
citing a battery of recent studies and concluding unequivocally that
“it’s worse to be raised by a single mother, even if you’re not poor.”
The author? UVA sociologist Brad Wilcox:

Children from poor and working-class homes are now doubly disadvantaged by their parents’ economic meager resources and by
the fact that their parents often break up. By contrast, children from
more-educated and affluent homes are doubly advantaged by their parents’
substantial economic resources and by the fact that their parents
usually get and stay married.

How, exactly, can changes in society that harm children possibly benefit their mothers?

In
the book’s most bewildering chapter, “A More Perfect Poison: The New
Wave of Female Violence,” Rosin says that women are becoming more
aggressive and powerful not just in the courts of Venus, but on the
field of Mars. It opens with the story of a California woman who killed
her husband by drugging him and stuffing him into a vat of acid,
followed by several accounts of women who poisoned their husbands, and
who are “remaking the lady poisoner archetype to fit with the upheaval
in our modern domestic arrangements.” Such a poisoner might be a
chemist, for example, with “an impressive job at a biochemical or
pharmaceutical company.” That means she wouldn’t be availing herself of
“household staples accessible to the average unhappy housewife” in order
to kill anybody. Exactly what of any value might be learned about
gender politics from such monstrosities isn’t really made clear.

But
female aggression in general is on the rise, according to Rosin. “Since
the United States passed mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence in
the late 1990s, arrest rates for women have skyrocketed, and in some
states reached 50 percent or more of all arrests.” We used to think that
women weren’t competitive or dominant, but “they are breaking through
even that last barrier, with the force of the Lady Gagas, Katniss
Everdeens, and schoolgirls with cleats and bruises.” I honestly can’t
tell whether or not Rosin sees this as a good thing, but again: we have
had brawling women as well as brawling men since the days of Boadicea,
if not earlier. Maybe the desperation among women has gotten worse in
tandem with their rising responsibilities in the working world. If it
has, that’s clearly a bug, not a feature.

By far the biggest problem with The End of Men
is its gender essentialism. The title isn’t a bit misleading; this is
manifestly a misandrist book. The men depicted are an incredibly sorry
lot, it’s true. Rosin shows one of them how to manage the complexities
of the microwave at 7-Eleven. Another, a lazy stay-at-home dad, is
unperturbed when his toddler son pees on the floor and smears poop on
the walls; when his high-achieving lawyer wife gets home, she cleans
everything and everybody up and cooks dinner like a “whirlwind” as her
no-count man sits on a stool to “watch her work”.

These guys have
been fired, laid off from manufacturing jobs, they’ve become OxyContin
addicts, they’re violent, they don’t pay child support. They go fishing
all day and drip fishy water onto the floor.

“They don’t like to
think too hard,” offers one woman, as an explanation of why men don’t
want to go to college. And when they do, “guys high-five one another
when they get a C, while girls beat themselves up over a B-minus.”
Another, of her boyfriend: “He has no opinion at all. He wants me to
tell him what to do.” Men! They spend hours playing video games! They
can’t sit still! They are “the new ball and chain.”

This kind of
thing makes Rosin come off like a mirror version of David Brooks,
drawing improbable conclusions from pretend or crazily narrow, twisted
bits of evidence or the most threadbare, throwback caricatures. “For
most of the [twentieth] century men derived their sense of manliness
from their work, or their role as head of the family,” we learn. “A
‘coalminer’ or a ‘rigger’ used to be a complete identity, connecting a
man to a long lineage of men. Implicit in the title was his role as
anchor of a domestic existence [...] They lost the old architecture of
manliness, but they have not replaced it with any obvious new one.” In
fact no, the architecture of manliness is exactly as it has ever been,
the lineage unbroken. Unzip the fly of the nearest man (ask first, I
guess) and you will find that nothing whatsoever has changed in this
regard. How many “riggers” did Rosin interview for this book?

Equality is the pole star of my own politics, and that made it really tough going for me to read The End of Men
objectively, or maybe even fairly, because it’s evident that Rosin
believes women to be literally — and inherently — superior to men. This
view is not only one I don’t share, it is anathema to me. It is the
exact reason why I have never been able to call myself a feminist; it
transgresses against my deepest conviction, namely, a belief in
universal human equality. I believe that each of us — all human beings
who share the same seemingly limitless abilities, and the same
unfathomable doom — should be able to develop his or her potential and
live freely and on equal terms in a condition of mutual respect and
support. That is not quite the Rosin view. “It’s possible that girls
have always had the raw material to make better students,” she writes,
“that they’ve always been more studious, organized, self-disciplined,
and eager to please, but, because of limited opportunities, what did it
matter?” Or: “Many of us hold out the hope that there is a utopia in our
future run by women, that power does not in fact corrupt equally.”
(Really, “many” of us hold out this hope? I for one would be too scared
it would turn out like that old Star Trek: TNG episode, “Angel One.”)

“When
it comes to the knowledge, drive, and discipline necessary to succeed,
women are the naturals with whom men have to strain to keep up.” Surely,
generalizations like these are unhelpful at best. Demographic groups
don’t compete, don’t study, don’t seek out the good life: individuals
do. That is not even getting into the fact that by “success,” Rosin
mainly means a better degree, a bigger salary, material comfort. Perhaps
that kind of thinking produces more unhappiness even than the gender
wars ever did. In any case, reading remarks like these is liable to
prove painful to any reader of very profound egalitarian convictions;
it’s like having the root that binds you to the universe hacked at with
some kind of machete of Amazonian cluelessness.

In Rosin’s world,
girls and women adapt, learn, and better their chances, but boys and men
somehow don’t. If violence against women has greatly diminished, if
“rape [has] declined sharply over the last thirty-five years,” Rosin
seems to think that this is because women have changed, not
because men have. Women have grown feistier, they have more power, ergo
they are harder to victimize: they have learned they can “say no.”
Surely, though, another possible reason for the decline in violence
against women might be that men are learning, too: that the basic ideas
of fairness and equality that have been promulgated in schools and media
since the 1970s — of gender equality, race equality, respect for others
— are working for men, as well as for women. The possibility that we’re
doing a better job of teaching men not to harm women doesn’t even get a
look in.

Beyond this, it appears, we have arrived at the crux of
the matter. How on earth can things be “better” only for women, but not
for men, or for children? Surely things can only be considered “better”
if they are better for everyone: the meanest intelligence in the world
would scorn an “improvement” that left her own mate, or her own
children, behind. How can we talk about “having it all” as if success
were something to be achieved only by individuals, each in the vacuum of
her own ambition, and not in families or communities, or marriages?

While we are on the subject of “having it all”: though I admired Anne-Marie Slaughter’s celebrated Atlantic essay, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” I was appalled to see Touré’s equally valuable response in Time
go almost completely ignored. “Men are more likely than women to choose
work at a cost to family,” he wrote. “Perhaps they suffer less
emotionally over that [though, wait — why would anyone think so?], but
there’s still pain there. We just push the feelings down and don’t complain. That’s why our side of this story rarely gets told.”

Progress
is not a zero-sum game. Society gains when the injustices against men
are addressed equally with the injustices against women. Surely it would
be wrong to hold one kind of progress hostage to the other. I hope we
haven’t forgotten how many young black men are in jail, or how many gay
men are discriminated against, or how many poor men are denied a decent
education. If we concentrate on the problems that all kinds of people
are having, rather than dividing everyone up into the equivalent of
rival football teams, won’t we have a better chance of setting things to
rights?

While I’m at it, how come everyone has his knickers in
such a twist about how we women make less money, but nobody seems to
care that the men still die younger than we do? Isn’t that at least
equally urgent a problem? I’ve often thought that the shorter lifespan
American men have traditionally enjoyed must have been owing to their
having to go out to do battle in the wider world alone, to take risks
that go unshared by their wives and children; theirs is a solitary,
thankless struggle with a heart attack waiting at the end of it. If a
man who operated as the head of a “traditional” family were to be fired,
or get sick, lose his job, who was going to pick up the slack? It was
all on him. Having grown up in such a household, and then establishing
the kind where there are two of us out there contending on behalf of our
family, it seems so clear that the latter way is fairer and saner for
men, and for women too.

It’s tempting to cite last year’s NIH
study showing that the life expectancy gender gap is narrowing as
evidence of this. As women increasingly share the burden of bringing
home the bacon for their families, the gap might eventually disappear altogether.

In
short, why aren’t we asking that our society come to “have it all”
together? Isn’t that the only way it would work? Is what we’re looking
at simply a calcified failure of empathy and of imagination — the sad
legacy of the Me Generation, which held that “self-realization” was the
goal of life? How can we realize ourselves alone? How can we realize
ourselves without one another?

Rosin’s son, Jacob, gets a shout-out in the acknowledgements of The End of Men:
“[He] asks me every day why I would write a book with such a mean
title. I always tell him that I want to convince people that some men
out there need our help, since it’s not always so easy for them to ask
for it. He doesn’t quite believe me yet, but maybe one day he will.”

Count
me on Jacob’s side of the question. How, exactly, does a book like
Rosin’s convince us that “some men out there need our help”? It sounds a
lot more like R.I.P. to me: an interpretation amply borne out by the
book’s contents.

The dedication of the book reads, “To Jacob, with
apologies for the title.” At least Rosin found grace enough to
apologize to Jacob. The rest of us are still waiting.
¤

13.00 Expert Panel discussion:‘Women in the Atheist movement, are we being denied a voice?’(With panelists PZ Myers, Greg Laden and Jeremy Stangroom)

14.00 Open discussion: “Is suppression of dissention becoming a problem in the modern skeptic movement?”This question will be answered by a show of hands amongst attendees.

14.15 Those who voted ‘Yes’ will be lined up, maced by Amanda Marcotte and escorted from the premises.

14.30 Apology to the Religious.The
Atheist movement as a whole (well, at least those unmaced by Amanda)
announces an official apology to the religious community.“We have
previously stated that people do not have the right not to be offended
by others. We realize now that we were wrong and offer our sincerest
apologies. We promise to avoid all behavior or public statements that
offends others because to do so in future would make us hypocrites of
the highest order."

15.00 Book BurningPlease bring along your copies of ‘The Ancestors Tale, The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion and The Greatest Show on Earth. Professor
Dawkins, will be at hand to sign your copy before it is tossed on the
pyre. Please come early as Professor Dawkins can only stay for one hour.

16.00 Richard Dawkins Burning.Sponsored by ‘Accomodationists-R-Us’

16.30 Stoning of the gender traitors

17.00 2011 Anti-Misogynist award.The
presentation of the 2011 award for those individuals showing true
example in avoiding privileged white male behavior towards women at
atheist conferences.This years award goes to the five Islamists who attended the Dublin Convention to promote Sharia Law.

17.30
The Winners of the James Randi 1 Million Dollar Challenge will be
presented their prize. The 1 million will be divided evenly between the
500 individuals on the Pharyngula and Skepchick messageboards for their
demonstration of perfect psychic abilities, mind reading exactly what
was going on in the head of Elevator Guy.

18.00 Keynote Speaker. Rebecca Watson“Misogyny in the atheist movement: What some random commenters on my youtube channel have to say.”(Rebecca’s 60 minute talk will be followed by a 1 minute period for questions and macing.)

The Librarian

“I have no doubt that, someday, the distortion of truth by the radical feminists of our time will be seen to have been the greatest intellectual crime of the second half of the twentieth century. At the present time, however, we still live under the aegis of that crime, and calling attention to it is an act of great moral courage” - Professor Howard S. Schwartz, of Oakland University in Michigan, USA, 2001